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    Sandra Elkin, Creator of a Pioneering Feminist Talk Show, Dies at 85

    “Woman,” which she hosted, brought frank talk about issues like birth control, pay inequality and homosexuality into millions of homes in the 1970s.Sandra Elkin, who as the creator and host of the weekly PBS talk show “Woman” in the mid-1970s brought frank discussions about birth control, job discrimination, health care and other issues confronting American women into millions of living rooms across the country, died on Nov. 8 at her home in Manhattan. She was 85.The cause was a heart attack, said her son Todd.Ms. Elkin was a stay-at-home mother in suburban Buffalo in 1972 when she approached the management of WNED, the local PBS member station, with an idea: a half-hour public affairs show focused on women and their concerns as the sexual revolution and second-wave feminism reshaped the gender landscape.Although she had no experience working in television, the station was sufficiently impressed with her pitch to give it the green light after just two weeks of negotiation.“Woman” was an immediate local hit, and after its initial season PBS picked it up for nationwide distribution. By 1974 it was reaching about 185 stations as far-flung as Fairbanks, Alaska, and Corpus Christi, Texas, distant from the liberal cities where the women’s movement had first emerged.Guests included a Who’s Who of contemporary feminism. Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, Dorothy Pitman Hughes and Susan Brownmiller all trooped to Buffalo to speak with Ms. Elkin. She also led an all-female crew to Paris to film an interview with Simone de Beauvoir.But most of her guests — housewives (and househusbands), prisoners, blue-collar workers — were far from famous, by intention. Ms. Elkin insisted that the show was about information, not entertainment, and that she was there merely as a “conduit.”“We don’t play the usual talk-show games,” she told The Buffalo News in 1975. “There’s no baiting guests or embarrassing them.”That’s not to say Ms. Elkin and “Woman” shied from controversy. Ms. Brownmiller sat for a two-episode interview about rape. An episode about birth control featured diaphragms and intrauterine devices, intimate items that many viewers probably considered exotic or even frightening, especially in conservative corners of the country.Still, the show won broad viewership among both men and women, in part thanks to Ms. Elkin and her unguarded warmth as a host. She had never wanted to be on camera, and she agreed to do so only after the first season ended and the original moderator, Samantha Dean, moved to another station.Sitting on a couch facing her guest, often with one leg tucked under her and casually dressed in jeans and a sweater, Ms. Elkin made viewers feel they were simply listening in on two friends talking.“Women love to teach each other things, to tell each other what they think,” she said in 1975. “I love being a part of this.”Sandra Ann Marotti was born in Rutland, Vt., on Oct. 16, 1938. Her father, John, was a tailor, and her mother, Lisle (Thornton) Marotti, was a secretary for an investment firm.She studied theater at Green Mountain College. While working in summer theater in Vermont she met Saul Elkin, a theater student at Columbia University. They married in 1958.The couple settled first in Vermont and in 1969 moved to Buffalo, where Mr. Elkin taught at the State University of New York.Ms. Elkin and a friend, who were growing bored as homemakers, pitched a conventional women’s show to WNED, focused on things like cooking and decorating. But they shelved the proposal when the friend moved to Florida.In 1972, the station asked if she was still interested. Yes, she replied. But she had a different idea.“A few years ago I started writing questions that were bothering me and my friends,” she said in an interview with The Kane Republican, a newspaper in Pennsylvania, in 1977. “I found that they broke down into categories that turned into the list of topics I first presented” to the station.She started with 30 show ideas, enough for a full season and then some. She didn’t need to search for more — within weeks of the first episode, Ms. Elkin found herself inundated with suggestions, via letters, phone calls and casual cocktail party conversations.After some 200 episodes, “Woman” went off the air in 1977. It ended for a variety of reasons, among them Ms. Elkin’s move to New York City and PBS’s decision to withdraw support from the show in favor of a more slickly produced women’s interest series with a magazine-style format.Ms. Elkin and Mr. Elkin divorced in the early 1980s. She married her longtime partner, Anke A. Ehrhardt, in 2013. Along with her son Todd, Dr. Ehrhardt survives her, as do another son, Evan, and two grandchildren.In New York, Ms. Elkin pursued a second career as a literary agent. She also produced videos on H.I.V. education at the height of the AIDS crisis and later traveled to South Africa to produce similar videos for local viewers.For the last two decades, she had pursued a series of long-term photography projects. One involved portraits of women around the world. Another focused on women town clerks in Vermont, the sort of people she considered the “first firewall of our democracy” — people she said were needed now more than over.“We’re at the precipice with democracy,” she said in a 2020 interview with the website Think Design. “We’re certainly at the precipice with climate change and with institutionalized racism and sexism. We’ve just got to step up and do what we need to do.” More

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    ‘Manahatta’ Review: Tracing the Blood-Soaked Roots of American Capitalism

    Straddling the 17th and early 21st centuries, Mary Kathryn Nagle’s play at the Public Theater examines the exploitation of the Lenape by Dutch settlers.Acknowledgments that New York was once home to the Lenape people have become a familiar refrain at arts venues. In “Manahatta,” the playwright Mary Kathryn Nagle undertakes a vital investigation of that willfully forgotten history so often rendered in shorthand. Now open at the Public Theater, just a few subway stops away from Wall Street, Nagle’s play traces the origins of American finance and the follies of its bottomless appetite for capital to the exploitation of the Lenape by the city’s Dutch settlers.The Lenape people have been so forcefully expelled from their Northeastern homelands that the descendants Nagle depicts, beginning in 2002, live in what is now Oklahoma. Jane (Elizabeth Frances), an MIT and Stanford graduate, is interviewing for an entry-level Wall Street job when her father dies on an operating table. By the time she returns home, her sister Debra (Rainbow Dickerson) and their mother Bobbie (a delightfully dry Sheila Tousey) are preparing for his funeral, and Bobbie is stuck with medical bills because the Indian Health Service, a government agency responsible for providing health services to Native peoples, has refused payment.Intercut with this family drama are fable-like scenes set in 17th-century Manahatta, where West India Company traders barter with the Lenape for furs coveted by the women they left behind in the Old World. The ensemble of seven actors appear in both timelines, including Enrico Nassi, who plays Luke, Jane’s childhood friend and would-be sweetheart, and Se-ket-tu-may-qua, an emissary who communicates with the Dutch and teaches Le-le-wa’-you, a Lenape woman also played by Frances, to speak their foreign tongue. Back in Manhattan, Jane is learning the sort of blustery talk necessary to chart her climb through the corporate ranks.First developed at the Public in 2014, when Nagle was a member of its Emerging Writers Group, “Manahatta” premiered at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 2018. Its purview is promising and ambitious: In addition to the blood-soaked roots of American capitalism, Nagle addresses the erasure of Native languages through forced assimilation, and the irrevocable impacts of Western violence, religion and consumer currency on Native culture.But the concept of homeownership, in the modern sense of subprime mortgages and the more ancient one of who can lay claims to land, forms the strongest throughline: The Dutch dupe a Lenape elder, played by Tousey, into selling them Manahatta for a song, while Michael (David Kelly), who is both the local pastor and a banker, helps Bobbie take out a loan against her house. Jane, though not without her misgivings, is meanwhile helping to manufacture the 2008 financial crisis, by selling mortgage-backed securities — it turns out she works for Lehman Brothers.Sheila Tousey, center, with ensemble members, all of whom appear in both timelines.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesDirected by Laurie Woolery, the production shifts seamlessly between the alternating time periods and locales, on a wilderness-meets-boardroom set by Marcelo Martínez García, and with particular help from Lux Haac’s costumes, whose fusion of fabrics and styles (a pinstripe pilgrim silhouette, for example) accomplish an impressive narrative arc on their own.The play draws direct, and at times reductive, parallels between the past and recent present. Jane’s bigwig bosses, played by Joe Tapper and Jeffrey King, are flat, greedy villains, figured as heirs to the deceptive, and ultimately murderous, founders of the market system (Tapper’s Dutch trader, at least, demonstrates some measure of humanity). But the white bad guys’ lack of complexity, though a missed opportunity, isn’t the most pressing problem.The Native characters, too, are almost exclusively products of circumstance, reacting to the systems that oppress them rather than approaching life with innate motivations. That defensive posture is understandable in the colonial context, but when Jane is asked why she wants to work on Wall Street, her only answer is because she has overcome obstacles to get there. Jane’s professional trajectory is rather one piece of Nagle’s grand design, which feels undersynthesized throughout much of the show’s 105-minute running time until it reaches a too-obvious conclusion.Even if this corrective account does not feel convincingly yoked to the drama onstage, an urgent significance to the facts is laid out in “Manahatta.” Nagle notes in the script that the play is a work of fiction, though it’s based on real events and was written in consultation with Lenape elders, whose ancestors are often evoked before curtains rise on New York stages. We would all do well to remember what they have lost.ManahattaThrough Dec. 23 at the Public Theater, Manhattan; publictheater.org. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. More

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    Off Broadway, a Vital Part of New York Theater, Feels the Squeeze

    The small theaters that help make the city a theater capital are cutting back as they struggle to recover from the pandemic.New York’s nonprofit Signature Theater has three modern performance spaces designed by the starchitect Frank Gehry, a long history of cultivating and championing major playwrights like Edward Albee and Lynn Nottage, and a board chaired by the Hollywood star Edward Norton.What Signature doesn’t have this fall are plays. The company, a mainstay of the Off Broadway scene, closed its most recent production in July and is not set to start its next show until the end of January.Even as Broadway claws its way back from the coronavirus pandemic, New York’s sprawling network of smaller theaters, many of them noncommercial in both tax status and taste, is struggling.“This is the hardest season yet,” said Casey York, the president of the Off-Broadway League, citing the combined effects of smaller audiences, shifting philanthropic patterns, rising wages and costs, and labor shortages at a time when the emergency government assistance that helped many theaters stay afloat through the lengthy pandemic shutdown has largely run out. “There is an incredible squeeze.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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    His ‘Dracula’ Project: Creating a Funny Vampire

    The great-grandnephew of Bram Stoker has written a comic version of “Dracula” that is appearing Off Broadway.Good morning. It’s Wednesday. We’ll meet someone who can laugh at Dracula because he’s like family. We’ll also find out why grade inflation has become an issue at Yale University.Matthew MurphyIn the past, Dacre Stoker has written or co-written serious fiction about his great-granduncle Bram, the man who gave the world that famous bloodthirsty Transylvanian at the end of the 19th century. Tonight, the younger Stoker will venture into comedy in an Off Broadway theater where “Dracula, a Comedy of Terrors” is playing.He told me last week that he had put together some funny material to deliver when joining the cast onstage after the performance. He said he would take along a prop and tell the actors: “Loved the performance. You might need a transfusion.”The prop won’t really be a transfusion: It will be red wine from a winery in Romania in which he has an interest. The winery is in Walachia, “the state below Transylvania,” he said. “We have given vampires to the country — why not get involved in commerce?”Stoker said his mission was to raise the profile of his ancestor “so the creator himself becomes at least half as famous as his creation.”He added: “This is how I started getting into writing the books and leading tours — asking, ‘Who is Bram Stoker?’ Bringing him into an Off Broadway comedy is another way to increase awareness of this guy.”He also enjoys making Dracula funny. “It’s nice to see that people can poke fun at a scary, horrifying novel that’s been around for 127 years,” he said. (Our reviewer Elisabeth Vincentelli called “Dracula, a Comedy of Terrors,” at New World Stages, “a gender-bending play” that “pays no mind to the ‘terrors’ part of its title.”)Dacre Stoker said his illustrious relative had connections to the world of theater: Bram Stoker’s “claim to fame before Dracula was running the famous Lyceum Theater in London for 27 years,” he said. He was the accommodating business assistant in the long shadow of the notoriously mercurial star Sir Henry Irving, the first actor ever knighted.“Irving had extravagant tastes,” he said, and Bram, who had a master’s in math, “had to hold him back while he crunched the numbers” at the theater, the great-grandnephew said.He also talked about the time his great-granduncle spent in New York: Bram Stoker joined the Players, the private club on Gramercy Park South, in 1893, when he and Irving were on one of eight American tours.“I saw the book where he was nominated by Samuel L. Clemens, his good friend and neighbor from Chelsea,” Dacre Stoker said, “so Mark Twain nominated him. He had more names seconding him than any other page I saw in the book.” Others have written about Bram Stoker’s fascination with the American poet Walt Whitman.Dacre Stoker, 65, a former member of the Canadian men’s pentathlon team who coached the team at the 1988 Olympics, said he had been “like this Indiana Jones version of a literary guy, trying to find the story behind the story, to bring this writer to life, to find out who Bram Stoker was.” He used material he found for “Dracul,” a prequel written with J.D. Barker and published in 2018 that envisioned what might have prompted Bram Stoker to create Dracula.That book followed a 2009 novel, “Dracula: The Un-Dead,” which Dacre Stoker wrote with the screenwriter Ian Holt, himself a Dracula historian. It was the first Dracula project authorized by the Stoker estate since the 1931 film that starred Bela Lugosi.WeatherA system sliding across the Mid-Atlantic states will mean a partly sunny day, with temperatures reaching the low 40s. At night, clouds will give way to a clearer sky, and the temperature will drop to around 30.ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKINGIn effect until Friday (Immaculate Conception).The latest Metro newsAhmed Gaber for The New York TimesConflict and CrisesIsrael-Gaza: Long before the temporary cease-fire ended in Gaza, the mood in Paterson, N.J., home to one of the largest communities of Palestinians outside the Middle East, was tense.Migrants and the mayor: New York City’s comptroller has restricted the mayor’s ability to quickly spend hundreds of millions of dollars on the migrant crisis — a major blow to his emergency powers.A Changing CityToward a quieter city: New York City, not exactly known for its peace and quiet, is expanding its use of “noise cameras,” which ticket the drivers of loud cars and motorcycles.The rich are back: At the height of the pandemic, the richest New Yorkers left in droves. A new report based on census and state tax filing data has found a reversal.Small theaters: New York’s nonprofit Signature Theater has three performance spaces, a history of cultivating major playwrights, and a board chaired by the Hollywood star Edward Norton. What Signature doesn’t have this fall are plays.Lots of A’s at YaleChristopher Capozziello for The New York TimesOne consequence of the pandemic has proved lasting at Yale University: Nearly everyone is getting A’s.A new report found that nearly 80 percent of the grades given to Yale undergraduates during the 2022-23 academic year were A’s or A minuses. The mean grade point average — 3.7 out of a possible 4.0 — was also up from before the pandemic.My colleague Amelia Nierenberg writes that the findings have frustrated some students and professors. What does excellence mean at Yale if 80 percent of the students get the equivalent of “excellent” in almost every class? Shelly Kagan, a Yale philosophy professor with a reputation as a tough grader, said that when “virtually everything that gets turned in” receives an A, “we are simply being dishonest to our students.”The post-pandemic spike in grades is not unique to Yale. At Harvard, 79 percent of all grades given to undergraduates in the 2020-21 year were A’s or A minuses. A decade earlier, that figure was 60 percent. In 2020-21, the average G.P.A. at Harvard was 3.8, compared with 3.41 in 2002-3.“Grades are like any currency,” said Stuart Rojstaczer, a retired Duke University professor who tracks grade inflation: They tend to increase over time.This is not just happening at elite schools. G.P.A.s have been increasing at colleges nationwide by about 0.1 per decade since the early 1980s, he said. But private colleges tend to have higher average G.P.A.s than public colleges and universities.At Yale, where an A is the new normal, the proportion of A’s and A minuses has been climbing for years. In the 2010-11 academic year, just over two-thirds of all grades at Yale — 67 percent — were A’s or A minuses. By 2018-19, the last full academic year before the pandemic, 73 percent were in the A range.Then, during the pandemic, the figure jumped. Almost 82 percent of Yale grades were in the A range in 2021-22. The figure slipped slightly, to about 79 percent, in 2022-23. The new statistics come from a report by Ray Fair, an economics professor whose work was first reported by The Yale Daily News. He declined to comment on his findings.Does any of this really matter?Pericles Lewis, the dean of Yale College, acknowledged that students could be overly concerned with G.P.A.s.But he added: “I don’t think many people care, 10 years out, what kind of grades you got at Yale. They mostly care that you, you know, you studied at Yale.”METROPOLITAN diaryTiffany frameDear Diary:I was cleaning out my closets when I came across a small Tiffany box. Much to my surprise, it did not appear to have ever been opened. Inside, covered in plastic, was a lovely sterling silver picture frame nestled in a Tiffany blue felt bag.Unfortunately, on close examination I could see that the silver had become tarnished. I tried to clean it, but to no avail.I called Tiffany and was told to bring it in for repair. So I traveled to Rockefeller Center, brought the box into the store and was directed to the repair department downstairs.I showed the frame to one of the women at the counter there. She called two other women over to take a look.The three of them admired it, but then said that they didn’t sell Tiffany items.“How could Tiffany not sell Tiffany?” I asked.“You’re in Saks Fifth Avenue!” one of the women said.— Eileen RosenbergIllustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.Stefano Montali and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@nytimes.com.Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. More

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    Late Night Foresees a Limited Audience for Fourth G.O.P. Debate

    Wednesday’s debate will air on platforms like NewsNation and the CW. “So, in other words, look for it wherever you get your computer viruses,” Seth Meyers joked.Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.Limited AudienceThe fourth Republican presidential primary debate will air Wednesday night on select platforms, such as NewsNation, Rumble and the CW.“So, in other words, look for it wherever you get your computer viruses,” Seth Meyers joked on Tuesday.“And the debate will air on the CW network and NewsNation. So if you want to know how good a chance these candidates have, the debate is airing on the CW network and NewsNation.” — JIMMY FALLON“At this point, watching these debates is like watching a middle school play — it doesn’t really matter, you just hope that they’re having fun up there.” — JIMMY FALLONThe Punchiest Punchlines (Mariah is Shaking Edition)“The new No. 1 song in the United States, according to the Billboard Hot 100, is 65 years old. ‘Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree’ by Brenda Lee, which was released in 1958, is at the top of the charts for the very first time. Brenda Lee was 13 when she recorded the song, which is crazy. A 13-year-old named Brenda? It’s insane.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“It’s never been No. 1 before, but for whatever reason it is now, and now Brenda Lee has a No. 1 hit at 78 years old. It’s nuts. I mean, between the president, the Golden Bachelor, and now Brenda Lee, old people are hotter than ever.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Yep, Brenda’s having a moment. Not only does she have the No. 1 song, today, she was seen holding hands with Travis Kelce.” — JIMMY FALLON“That’s right, Brenda Lee’s ‘Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree’ has hit No. 1. Meanwhile, Mariah Carey spent the day cutting letters out of magazines: ‘Back off, B.’” — JIMMY FALLON“People are loving something that’s been around for over six decades. This is actually the best news Joe Biden’s had in years.” — JIMMY FALLONThe Bits Worth WatchingRobin Thede, who appears in the holiday movie “Candy Cane Lane,” touched on Black Santa and the legacy of her Emmy-winning series, “A Black Lady Sketch Show,” on Tuesday’s “Daily Show.”What We’re Excited About on Wednesday NightMahershala Ali, a star in “Leave the World Behind,” will appear on Wednesday’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”Also, Check This OutRooney Mara and Cate Blanchett in “Carol.”Wilson Webb/The Weinstein CompanyFrom “Eyes Wide Shut” to “Carol,” classic holiday films don’t always center on Christmas. More

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    ‘Fargo’ Season 5, Episode 4 Recap: Trick or Treat

    Halloween provides the perfect disguise for a home invasion. Of course, this is “Fargo,” so nothing goes quite as planned.Season 5, Episode 4: ‘Insolubilia’One of the strengths of “Fargo” this season is the way it has drawn closer to the Coensverse by re-contextualizing major pieces of it, rather than by tucking in referential Easter eggs for fans to collect. (Although it has done plenty of that, too.) The first attempt to abduct Dot, for example, closely mirrors the sequence in the Coens’ “Fargo” where Jean Lundegaard has her morning routine disrupted by intruders, though Dot proves far more capable of defending herself. She is determined, beyond all reason, to be like Jean, the housewife and P.T.A. mom who carves out a little time to knit in front of weekday talk shows. But she cannot escape who she really is.Roy Tillman has no interest in escaping from his past. He is building it out into a corrupt, theocratic fief across North Dakota and the open expanses of the Upper Midwest. He is a third-generation lawman, just like Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) in “No Country for Old Men,” but he doesn’t share Bell’s fears about facing a world of overwhelming evil because voters have put him in a position to perpetuate it. Whatever justice might be achieved in this season of “Fargo,” it is going to happen despite him and the tremendous political and tactical arsenal he has at his disposal.Late in this week’s episode, Roy is framed exactly like Bell at the end of “No Country,” as a retired Bell sits at home in front of a windowsill with his wife, recalling bleak, dead-haunted dreams about his father. Only here, the windowsill is in another couple’s mobile home and Roy expresses no misgivings about the violence he is about to unleash. We had seen him in an earlier episode counseling this same couple about an incident of domestic violence that Roy chose to manage in typically extralegal fashion, with a threat to the husband about his behavior and, let’s say, some antiquated advice on how his wife might fulfill her duties.As he smugly holds court on a Biblical passage relevant to this situation, Roy anticipates everything that is about to happen, just as he anticipated the likelihood of the husband’s getting physical with his wife again. He knows that he can goad this “beta man” into trying to shoot him, and he knows that he’ll be the quicker draw. He also knows that he can count on the wife to support his cover story: that the man he just shot is Munch, who had come home bragging about killing a state trooper and wounding another one. On Roy’s turf, the best way to cover up his connection to dead bodies is with other dead bodies.Roy’s extralegal tendencies have drawn the attention of Meyer and Joaquin, the two F.B.I. agents itching to impose law to the lawless lawman. But their appetite for justice isn’t shared by their overseer, who tells them, “Maybe he loses the election and the whole thing goes away.” The political allusion to Donald Trump here is unmistakable: Should the law be applied to Roy as if he were any other citizen, or do the voters get to decide whether his alleged sins are forgivable? In Roy’s case, as in Trump’s, there’s the considerable threat of “what happens next” that separates him from an ordinary candidate for prosecution. The agents are reminded that Roy is “the most powerful sheriff in North Dakota” and he is connected to “the most powerful militia in the Upper Midwest.” A lost election might guarantee a quieter withdrawal from public life.Yet the voters may not have a voice in this matter, after all. This week, we learn that Dot, formerly Nadine, was Roy’s second wife. And despite her valiant attempts to deny her identity and everything that has happened to her, Dot has been identified as the woman on the surveillance camera who outwitted Munch and his partner and saved Witt Farr, the wounded state trooper. In the aftermath of a home invasion that left her husband electrocuted and their home burned to cinders, Dot tries to brush off the whole thing as a case of bad wiring and refuses to acknowledge Witt, who wants to thank her for saving his life.The obvious question for Witt and Olmstead is why Dot would deny such acts of valor ever happened. Surely the Roy connection will give them some clues.Another big question to consider: What is supposed to happen if Dot/Nadine is brought back to Roy? He does not want her killed but returned, and she has proved to be an exceptionally wily captive. Perhaps that speaks to a key parallel between Dot and Roy, which is that they will deny reality if they have the opportunity to manipulate it to their own ends. Roy believes himself mandated by God and the voters to manage his domain as he sees fit, like tagging one gunshot victim as Munch and burying another before he can be verified as the victim of a “car accident.” Dot still refuses to loosen her grip on a domestic utopia that is now literally turned to ash. Perhaps the two are made for each other, after all.3 Cent StampsThe Gator-led assault on the Lyons’ den is thrillingly staged, from the half-silly/half-menacing “The Nightmare Before Christmas” masks to the small twists on expectations. Although Dot is able to fend off her attackers, some of her home security innovations backfire, like the lightbulb rigged to work as an alarm and the exposed wiring that ends up electrocuting her husband.Roy and Dot are both rooted in spiritual conviction, which the episode puts in pointed contrast. At the chapel on his ranch, Roy refers to the crucified Jesus as “old friend” while recalling an incident in which he watched Beelzebub himself whisper into the ear of a killer. In another scene, Dot assures a shaken Scotty that “the wicked stick to the darkness while we get to stay in the light.”Shrewd juxtaposition between Olmstead’s call from a predatory “debt-relief specialist” and Lorraine’s spin job to a Forbes reporter on Redemption Services, the business that netted her $1.6 billion in profit the previous year. Perhaps the funniest moment of the episode is the way Jennifer Jason Leigh quietly nods, “of course,” when a lackey whispers in ear that her son’s house has been burned down.“With all due respect, we’ve got our own reality.” — Danish Graves, giving voice to the episode’s thesis.Munch asks for “pancakes,” affirming him as a much smarter (and chattier) version of Gaear Grimsrud in the movie. More

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    ‘Life & Times of Michael K’ Review: An Arduous Trek That’s a Marvel to Watch

    This captivating adaptation of J.M. Coetzee’s novel, a collaboration with Handspring Puppet Company, follows a man and his ailing mother during a civil war in South Africa.His chin is pitched forward, his ears protrude and his brow is furrowed over glinting black eyes. The protagonist of “Life & Times of Michael K,” which opened on Monday at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, has the countenance of a man in perpetual pursuit. A refugee trapped in his own country, he is a puppet manipulated by forces beyond his control.Even as his wood-carved features remain placid, he is an extraordinary embodiment of human reflex and interiority created by the Handspring Puppet Company. When he collapses into a crumpled heap of disjointed limbs, or gambols triumphantly to a playground refrain, his figure demonstrates operatic feeling with delicate precision. It is a marvel to behold.So is the entirety of this captivating and transportive production, adapted and directed by Lara Foot from the Booker Prize-winning 1983 novel of the same name by J.M. Coetzee. Set amid a fictional civil war in South Africa, the story charts a journey undertaken by Michael K and his ailing mother, Anna, from a besieged Cape Town to her rural birthplace, Prince Albert. What begins as a fulfillment of Michael’s filial duty evolves into a philosophical pilgrimage, away from civilization’s destructive conflicts toward direct communion with nature.But first Michael has to load his mother into a souped-up wheelbarrow and cart her out of the city. Stooped over with age and illness, Anna has a raspy, giddy laugh that lends an air of adventure to their escape from bombardment and destitution. Mother and son are each maneuvered, bunraku-style, by up to three puppeteers at once, animated by a combination of intricate movement and vocalizations that include not just dialogue, but grunts, sighs and heaves of effort.The puppetry, created and designed by Adrian Kohler, and directed here by Kohler and Basil Jones, both Handspring founders, achieves a manner of artistic transcendence. How is it possible to render the cascading traumas of displacement, loss and captivity into a legible aesthetic experience? There is a distancing mechanism inherent to the form that allows for these figurines — assemblies of wood, cane and carbon fiber — to illustrate feelings and circumstances otherwise too extreme and dire to visualize with actors onstage. Projection design by Yoav Dagan and Kirsti Cumming, in addition to depicting shifts in landscape, magnifies the characters’ etched faces in detail.The production smartly emphasizes the Odyssean incidents of Coetzee’s novel and adheres closely to Michael’s point of view, our critic writes. The cast includes, from left, Billy Langa (standing in the background), Craig Leo, Carlo Daniels, Faniswa Yisa and Roshina Ratnam.Richard TermineAnd each puppet, including a brave but ill-fated goat and three curious children, is the sum of magnificent, multipronged performances, led by the puppet master Craig Leo, who handles adult Michael alongside Markus Schabbing and Carlo Daniels. When a ravenous Michael is offered a chicken pie, each one of his puppeteers tears off a furious bite. And when a restless Anna keeps Michael awake at night, her fussing and fidgeting are a symphonic collaboration between Faniswa Yisa, Roshina Ratnam and Nolufefe Ntshuntshe.Foot’s adaptation, presented here by Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus and Baxter Theater Centre, where Foot is the artistic director, smartly emphasizes the Odyssean episodes of Coetzee’s novel and adheres closely to Michael’s point of view. Third-person narration is delivered to the audience by multiple performers, including Andrew Buckland, Sandra Prinsloo and Billy Langa, a shuffle of voices that gives the production’s uninterrupted two hours a sustained sense of urgency and momentum. (The show was also presented this summer at the Edinburgh Fringe.)The inventive and atmospheric stagecraft captures the spartan, poetic quality of Coetzee’s prose. The sunrise ambers and midnight blues of Joshua Cutts’s lighting design illuminate Michael’s states of mind as much as they do time and place. Kyle Shepherd’s score is rich with both ominous and aching strings and piano, while David Classon’s sound transports Michael from the chaos of a war-torn metropolis to the swishy silence beneath a river’s surface. Patrick Curtis’s versatile soot-colored set and the earth-toned streetwear designed by Phyllis Midlane facilitate the production’s expansive canvas.The race of Coetzee’s itinerant hero, written during South Africa’s apartheid, is only lightly specified in the novel, where Michael is classified in official documents as “CM,” or colored male. Onstage, Michael and Anna’s features offer a similarly subtle indication of their background. It is a radical artistic gesture, given the narrative’s setting, that posits Michael K as a symbol of human existence. It’s a timely one, too, to consider the possibility of a connection with one’s homeland that surpasses earthly conflicts.Life & Times of Michael KThrough Dec. 23 at St. Ann’s Warehouse, Brooklyn; stannswarehouse.org. Running time: 2 hours. More

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    Best Comedy of 2023: Jim Gaffigan, Beth Stelling and More

    It’s time to stop taking Jim Gaffigan for granted, and more surprising takeaways from specials, stand-up sets and other funny moments this year.Comedy didn’t boom or bust this year. It sprawled. There seemed to be many more specials than ever, most self-released. Yet Netflix still reigned, dominating the conversation with event specials from John Mulaney and Chris Rock. Twitter (now X) became old news for jokes, while TikTok and Instagram bustled with young performers. Here are a few highlights.Best SpecialIt’s easy to take Jim Gaffigan for granted. His consistency can become boring, and his interests (food, religion) tend not to draw headlines. Over the years, he’s been pigeonholed as the clean comic or the Hot Pockets one (because of a signature bit). But while he’s not flashy, each year he gets a little better, figuring out new challenges that fit his everyman aesthetic. With his 10th special, “Dark Pale” on Prime Video, his comedy has become so skillful, varied and pleasingly prickly that it demands closer attention. Leveraging his benign dad persona, he paints a scathing portrait of our culture post-pandemic that makes you laugh at our cruelty, haplessness and delusions.Best BreakthroughBeth Stelling is a meticulous professional in “If You Didn’t Want Me Then.”Netflix“You have to be careful with pedophilia,” Beth Stelling says in her wry new hour, “If You Didn’t Want Me Then” on Netflix, pausing for a precise beat, “because you catch it just by touching a kid.” After this risky joke, she picks up a cup of tea and sips, daintily. Then she sticks her pinkie out, as if she’s a member of the royal family. It’s one of many small perfect moments in her comedy, which can be as warm and loving as it is crass and ruthless, that reveals her as a meticulous professional in her prime.Best StorytellerIt’s exciting to come across a comic who resists comparisons. In his fascinating special “The Domino Effect Part 2: Loss,” on YouTube, Ali Siddiq tells childhood stories with a jaunty delivery that has a different pace than anyone else’s. Is he even a comic? He’s telling high-stakes, dramatic tales of heartbreak and run-ins with the police, but with the lightness and ease of someone just filling you in about their day. Sad and thrilling, odd and straightforward, rambling and intentional, these are yarns that grab your attention, then toy with it.Best BitJohn Early (with Will Lawrence) mixes satire and cover songs in “Now More Than Ever.”HBOJohn Early is a forerunner of, and the gold standard for, the fashionable genre of musical comedians (Catherine Cohen, Caitlin Cook, Sophie Zucker, Leo Reich) parodying millennial and Gen Z vanity. His long-awaited special, “Now More Than Ever” (on Max), is a mix of stylish satire, soulful cover songs and occasional observational humor. At its high point, he takes a conventional premise, about how Apple manipulates users to collect their data, and transforms the idea into a comic tour de force centered on the ugly phrase “Ask app not to track.” He repeats it so memorably that it’s been lodged in my brain ever since.Best New Double ActLike many funny duos, April Clark and Grace Freud of Girl God look and sound nothing alike — one a lanky slacker, the other a more fiery baritone — but they riff so effortlessly that they seem to merge. In videos announcing themselves as joke writers for Dave Chappelle or in shows raging sarcastically about their Uber driver asking how they are (“Google: The news”), they favor fabrication and transgression, accumulating momentum out of pingpong conversation more than conventional jokes.Best Closer Even an act-out is haunted by death in Marc Maron’s special “From Bleak to Dark.”Oluwaseye Olusa/HBOWhat would suicide by bat look like? Only a comedian would think long and hard on the subject. In “From Bleak to Dark” (Max), Marc Maron imagines it as pitiful, anguished and riotously comic. This act-out, coming at the end of a special haunted by death, operates like the scene in Hunter S. Thompson’s book on the Hells Angels in which Thompson, after spending months hanging out with the biker gang, describes getting beat up by them. It’s a perverse catharsis.Best Online RoasterThe arch-elitist Dan Rosen has created his own critical beat on Instagram, doing stylish and ruthless insult comedy on tasteless interior design, hack décor and shallow architecture. Projecting his face over photos of celebrity homes, he displays an acute eye for overdone trends (anyone with a green kitchen should be ashamed) and a knack for the perfect put-down (“the granny couch”). He compares Chris Brown’s floors to a bowling ball, then says: “I would say it’s the worst crime he ever committed” before a pause.Best Canadian Newcomer“I moved to America this year,” Sophie Buddle said at the start of her “Tonight Show” set in April. “I wanted to see it before it ends.” Then she sucked in her bottom lip and giggled. This chirpy, comic maintains a steady nervous chuckle while joking about masturbation and annoying Los Angeles types. But she knows what she’s doing, finding fresh spins on familiar subjects. She is part of a long line of cheerfully raunchy young comics, and her sneaky jokes are full of sharp elbows. When talking about the United States, there’s pity in her voice that feels like revenge for so many years of American comic condescension toward our northern neighbor.Best Take on Crowd WorkIn a short Netflix set commemorating the 60th anniversary of the Improv club, Deon Cole lays into how comics repeatedly ask audiences to do things like “give it up for the ladies.” Looking besieged, he says, “Got me wasting my claps.”Best Response to a Beeping CellphoneUpon hearing that familiar sound during his recent hour, Joe Pera responded in a deadpan, “You just ruined my life,” then kept it moving.Best ImpressionThat the John Mulaney special “Baby J” (on Netflix) manages to live up to expectations is a feat, considering he addresses his much-publicized stint in rehab and, less so, his equally talked-about divorce. His re-creation of his star-studded intervention shows off a multitude of niche accents. And yet, he gets the biggest laughs going broad and traditional with his Al Pacino take. One distinctive voice nails another.Best BuffoonDiana Morgan as Philomena Cunk in “Cunk on Earth.”Jonathan Browning/NetflixIn the grand British tradition of Alan Partridge and Borat, Diane Morgan’s long-running character, Philomena Cunk, finds laughs through the bloviating of a self-assured idiot. Her comic documentary series, “Cunk on Earth” (on Netflix), finds her in tasteful clothes, inside museums and outside ruins, asking intellectuals questions like, “Is there a great roof of China?”Best YouTube SpecialA highly competitive category. Never have there been more funny people putting out specials on this platform. Django Gold’s folksy screwball jokes, Chase O’Donnell’s deliriously ditsy act, Seaton Smith’s sneaky Madison Square Garden show and Joe List’s hilariously straining efforts to prove that he is fun are highlights. But Nathan Macintosh’s “Money Never Wakes” stands out for its exasperated comic laments about the cocooned lives of the 1 percent. His jokes are tightly constructed, and what makes them sing is his nervy voice, which starts to squeak when he gets worked up, almost as if the sound is coming from a record speeding up.Best Comic-on-Comic ComedyGary Gulman’s new special, “Born on Third Base” (due Dec. 21), is filled with the intricate, language-drunk jokes that have built him into a critical darling. This is his most political and pointed work, focusing on the inequities of class. He uses many subjects to illustrate his point (his take on dentistry is very funny) including the disparity in comedy, with Jerry Seinfeld as an example of the elite. Gulman’s consideration of Seinfeld’s wealth will get attention, but what stands out more is his strong series of jokes on Pop-Tarts, a subject Seinfeld has owned for years and is making a movie about for Netflix.Best Gen Z SurrealistIf the next David Lynch comes from TikTok, where a Dada aesthetic reigns in many of the short comic videos, keep an eye on Savannah Moss, a cheerful young Arizona absurdist who is just getting started. She produces, edits and stars in cartoonishly bizarre videos featuring milk spilling from the sky, goofy puns, jump scares and prop humor, along with Moss herself leaping and spinning in the air for no reason. She calls these quick hits of nonsense fever dreams, and they resist logic, though they have circular narratives that work well on repeat. And while these bits remain raw, watching her slowly but prolifically develop a distinctive handmade visual vocabulary gives me hope for this digital medium. More